Search Results for: wedding

As Beauty Does

Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

Chaya Bhuvaneswar | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,169 words)

1.

The first time I was beautiful wasn’t until I was 18. “Beautiful.” A category I inhabited. It was a created condition, both objective and real. I remember the resolve, pain, doubt and certainty that preceded it, and then a day when it was effortless and the boys were coming up to me. Nearly every conversation, freshman year, was about how beautiful I was, how long I’d stay a virgin, whether I would ever date men who weren’t Indian, and on and on, boring as hell. Never revealing how much I enjoyed certain women. Never quite getting to my truth.

Beauty or truth, though. Hardly a contest. In beauty, I strutted through my young adult life. As long as my abs could be sucked in, I was indulged, allowed to dream. I could wave, dismissive, at the truth. “Your hands are so delicate,” said my first boyfriend, white. Then added, whispering, “You’re so delicate,” lifting me up so easily, in love with how light I was.

I was imprisoned by the safety of beauty, as much as by the refuge of his burly arms. I ran a set number of miles, panting with enjoyment but never giving up counting. Always, albeit with relief, I burned time stroking and measuring. Beauty was my protective shell, shielding me against overtly racist words, at least some of the time. There was still racism, I realized later, but of a different kind, constructing me into a Barbie-like peach-brown “passive Asian girl” — and then an uptight, nerdy bitch; anyone who came close got to understand that I wasn’t really passive. But there was safety, the privilege of which I didn’t believe was mine to lose. Till I lost it. Till I could longer fit into the category of “desired,” that I’d long desired. Till I didn’t fit into my favorite leggy jeans.
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The Neanderthal

Illustration by Lily Padula

Jen Gilman Porat | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,447 words)

A couple of years ago, I purchased a pair of 23andMe kits for myself and my husband, Tomer. I intended to scientifically prove that Tomer’s most irritating behaviors were genetic destiny and therefore unchangeable. I’d grown tired of nagging him — oftentimes, I’d hear my own voice rattling inside my brain in the same way a popular song might get stuck in my head. I needed an out, something to push me toward unconditional acceptance of my husband. My constant complaining yielded zero behavior modification from on his part; on the other hand, it was changing me into a nasty micromanager. I briefly considered marital therapy, but that’s an expensive undertaking, costing much more than the $398.00 one-time fee for both DNA kits. Plus, couples’ therapy could take a long time, requiring detours through our shared history. In much appealing contrast, 23andMe, promised to launch us straight back to our prehistoric roots, to an earlier point in causality, one that might provide Tomer with something akin to a formal pardon note, thereby permitting me to stop fighting against him, once and for all. I imagined we could help others by way of example too, for what long-married woman has not suffered her husband’s most banal tendencies — the socks and underwear on the floor, the snoring? Not me, actually, because my husband puts his used clothes in the hamper, and I’m the snorer. Really, I’m probably blessed as far as masculine disgustingness goes. But my husband is flawed in one repulsive way: his barbaric table manners.

I have no doubt this is a genetic situation, for even back when we were first dating, I’d shuddered upon seeing my father-in-law poke through the serving bowls of a family-style meal with his bare hairy hands. My husband’s father has also been caught eating ice cream directly from the carton (the thought of which I now appreciate for its built-in binge deterrent). Moreover, my father-in-law eats like a caveman-conqueror, reaching across dinner plates to pluck a taste of this or that from his mortified tablemates. A family dinner looks like a scene straight out of Game of Thrones, minus any crowns. And so, when my husband first began to exhibit similar behaviors, I had to wonder: Had I suffered some rare form of blindness previously? Did some barrier of unconscious denial gently shield my eyes each day, year after year, but only at mealtimes? It was as if a blindfold suddenly fell from my face, or as if Tomer had finally removed a mask from his own. My gentleman turned into a beast, seemingly overnight.

I watched with horror, one Sunday evening, as my husband served himself a plate of meat and vegetables with his hands. His fingers ripped skirt steak in lieu of cutting it with a knife. He abandoned his fork altogether, and I lost my appetite.

Had Tomer suffered some obscure symptom of the mid-life crisis? Or was this a regressed state? During a phone conversation with a close friend, I described my father-in-law’s vile eating manners and wondered if his pre-existing condition had grown contagious. She suggested Tomer’s change of behavior might indicate an epigenetic effect; she’d read somewhere that some aspects of our genetic code lie in wait and get activated along the way. Apparently, some inherited traits remained invisible for years, hiding patiently in our cells until: Surprise! Just when you hit middle age and are totally comfortable in your own skin (despite the new fine lines around your eyes and those brown circles that are hopefully age spots and not melanoma), some new biological fact of your genetic code makes itself manifest, waking you up from your mid-age slumber.

Another interesting detail I could not ignore: Around the same time Tomer stopped liking forks, he’d adopted the Paleo diet, (versions of which are known as the caveman diet). He’d cut all processed foods from his intake, eating nothing but meat, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. Prior to going Paleo, he’d suffered from a severe case of irritable bowel syndrome and relied on bread products, thinking that challah and croissants were the softer, gentler foods. I suspected a gluten allergy and told him to lay off all the Pepperidge Farm cookies. I probably even told him to “eat like a caveman,” but I only meant for him to eat a more natural and gluten-free diet, in order to heal him, which in fact, it did.

“My stomach is no longer a quivering idiot,” Tomer said, and he said it more than once, to countless friends and family members, until he’d worked up a complete narrative on how he’d triumphed over his very own stomach. And each time he told this story, he lifted his shirt, pounding his fists upon his midsection. His proud smile began to appear, well, wild and hungry, as if he’d tamed his digestive system but in doing so, had activated a primitive gene and sacrificed his own civility.

Shortly thereafter, I came across an article pertaining to Neanderthal DNA. According to modern science, the Neanderthals and our prehistoric ancestors mated, leaving many of us with a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. I did more Googling and learned that 23andMe can tell you how much Neanderthal DNA you carry. Although they do mean different things, in my mind’s eye, the words “Neanderthal” and “Caveman” summoned identical images: that of savage meat-eating maniacs ripping raw meat from bone with fat fingers and jagged teeth.

And this was it — the thing that sold me on 23andMe: the chance to determine one’s degree of Neanderthal-ness. Without any consideration of all the possible consequences of submitting one’s DNA to a global database, I ordered two kits, grinning and convinced that my husband’s result would show a statistically significant and above average number of Neanderthal variants in his genome. Since Father’s Day was only a month away, I decided I’d giftwrap the kits upon arrival too. I’d kill two birds with one stone.
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Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: A Reading List About Witches

The Witches Sabbath, by Frans Francken II, 1607.

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

What is a witch, anyway? Is it an old woman with green skin stirring a pot of something weird and stinky in an animated fairy tale? Is it a man who lives in the wilderness in isolation and emerges only to perform specific rituals to bring the rains? Is it a hippie chick in Berkeley in flowing fabrics appropriating cultural totems and symbols in order to get a desperate wealthy tech couple fertile and baby-ready? Based on my research, the answers seem to be “sure,” “yes,” and “I mean, I guess so.”

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Alexa de Paris

Warner Brothers, Getty / Corbis / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Miles Marshall Lewis | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,622 words)

When I first heard the song “Alexa de Paris” by Prince and the Revolution in the spring of 1986, I was only a year younger than Alexa, and I had no idea who she was. No one ever said. Alexa Fioroni was a painter who taught and traveled the world, but most notably, she danced. Born in Oklahoma City, she moved to the South of France with her mother after her parents’ divorce in the 1970s. She took ballet lessons there from a South American expatriate at 9 years old. By 14, she had enrolled in an intensive study program at the Opéra National de Paris, the only American pirouetting around, later advancing to the Conservatoire de Paris dance school. She remained elusive to me until I began researching this essay. As I listened to the orchestral strings and guitar solos of the song’s gorgeous symphonic rock back then, Paris was just as much a mystery to me as Alexa Fioroni.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference. None of the personalities well known to me much later meant anything to me then: Frantz Fanon, Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Luc Godard, Aimé Césaire, François Truffaut, Brigitte Bardot. The advanced placement English classes at my public high school didn’t teach négritude. They eventually got around to existentialism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus — but not until senior year. James Baldwin lived in France, but I hadn’t read James Baldwin. Black Boy had blown me away back in sixth grade. For years, Richard Wright might’ve been the only black writer I was aware of (aside from Alex Haley), but nobody told me he’d lived in Paris. My parents didn’t have passports; my grandparents didn’t have passports.

That wasn’t always the case. Faded vacation photographs from Paris lay buried somewhere in a photo box at the bottom of a closet in our three-bedroom apartment, pictures of the trip my mom took with a girlfriend as a high school graduation gift in 1969. By 1970 she’d be a married mother, a yawning chasm stretched between the 18-year-old Evander High School student she’d been and the 19-year-old South Bronx homemaker she’d so quickly become.

* * *

My first impressions of Paris, my first time bothering to consider the city as a real place with real people walking around it came from Under the Cherry Moon, the romantic comedy Prince filmed on the French Riviera in late 1985. The movie wasn’t set in Paris. I didn’t understand that at the time. A soundtrack album, Parade, preceded the film by four months, and I pored over the packaging in my bedroom for all the clues I could find about this follow-up to Purple Rain. The packaging of the album — yes, a vinyl disc meant for turntables, enclosed in a cardboard sleeve finely designed with cover art — contained black-and-white photos of Prince and the Revolution collaged with strips of pages from a French novel. But I didn’t know French then — I skirted through Italian classes with a string of D’s. The page ribbons could have come from a porn magazine, a cookbook, or some instruction manual.


 

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The Parade album-liner photomontage fixes the Venus de Milo amid guitarist Wendy Melvoin, bassist Brown Mark, and keyboardist Matt Fink as if Aphrodite had joined the Revolution. Prince placed the melancholy piano piece “Venus de Milo” at the end of Parade’s side one. A statue of the Greek goddess is actually on permanent display at the Louvre museum in Paris. French by association I suppose. Parade also featured “Do U Lie?,” a whimsical bit of café jazz complete with accordion and introduced by a French girl explaining, “Les enfants qui mentent ne vont pas au paradis.” Children who lie don’t go to heaven. Prince flattered the object of his affection on the chorus to one of my favorites, “Girls & Boys,” with “vous êtes très belle” and talk of kissing on the steps of Versailles. (Where was that? I wondered.) Plus, the majestically beautiful instrumental “Alexa de Paris” was the flip-side bonus to Parade’s “Mountains” single. Orchestral arrangements conducted by the late Clare Fischer gave Parade more of a European feel than any of Prince’s seven previous albums — the French horns, the trumpets and trombones, the violins and violas.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference.

* * *

Piano practice swallowed a lot of my hours in the 1980s. An older Jewish woman a few buildings away offered lessons. My mother and father forced me out of my comforting cocoon of comic books and TV addiction to learn the piano for 12 months. I was 9. They promised I could drop the private class after a year if I wasn’t interested anymore. I wasn’t. But by the time Parade arrived I’d discovered sheet music to songs I felt like learning and came back to the piano. I’d spend just enough practice time after school to learn Janet Jackson and Doug E. Fresh and Prince songs by heart. Mostly Prince songs. My grandmother’s upright piano could never be pitch-perfectly tuned, but furniture movers hauled it from her South Bronx apartment straight to my bedroom anyway for those childhood lessons. I learned “The Beautiful Ones” on that out-of-tune Kemble. “Paisley Park,” “Pop Life” and “God (Love Theme from Purple Rain)” too. By the time I mastered the chords of “Under the Cherry Moon,” its namesake finally showed up in movie theaters.

Prince’s tragicomedy bombed, but that didn’t matter. In my mind I was following in his footsteps: learning his songs; writing terrible lyrics; taking the Truman High recording studio class taught by the choir director (a white rap producer who managed Doug E. Fresh); having sex; acting pretentious. I fantasized about moving on to guitar, or songwriting, or whatever else necessary to grow up to be just like Prince. I was 15, I had time. But with Under the Cherry Moon, Prince now knew something I definitely didn’t. He knew France. I had to get there.

* * *

I made it into college by the skin of my teeth. I returned home from Atlanta after freshman year for my first summer break and met a beautiful girl on the uptown 6 train. This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores, and so it was the Year of Batman, 1989. (It was also the year of the first De La Soul album, 3 Feet High and Rising, and the year of Do the Right Thing, but with my 18-year-old obsessions, that hot summer could only have been the Year of Batman.) We peeked at one another when the other wasn’t looking, over and over, as the train stopped and started on its way to the terminus at Pelham Bay Park. We never spoke. We waved a week later at Times Square station, surprised to see each other again in another borough. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t much good at courageous flirtation. I’d heard Prince suffered from shyness and I could relate. When I finally saw her again — apricot skin, smiling eyes, round face draped by thin extension braids — I found my courage. Simone was a rising senior at the performing arts high school downtown, the one from Fame. Her youth didn’t make me any braver.

Simone danced in the video to Young MC’s “Bust a Move” that summer. I’d play the cassette single on a loop in my boombox back down at school and think of her. She sang, she danced, she acted. Simone idolized triple threats like Debbie Allen and Vanessa Williams, full of artistic plans and schemes. We spent the summer of Batman at the Sound Factory nightclub downtown dancing to “French Kiss.” She modeled clothes for me at Emilio Cavallini on Madison Avenue, where she worked. Right away I had romanticized my idea of her — some ingénue artiste — out of all proportion, killing any possibility of an authentic relationship. Friend zone, meet unrequited love. A pretty girl from the Bronx with dreams, so different from the handful of girlfriends in my brief history with love, Simone suffered my awkward advances through graduation and her first few years at Sarah Lawrence College.

There was no one more appropriate to introduce me to Paris than Simone, studying abroad in 1994 at the École Normale de Musique conservatory. “Do the Boodiewop” somehow failed to catapult her girl group Ariél onto the radio in ’92, but the trio’s full album remained a work in progress. The pipe-dream illusions of my own imaginary music career ended in college. I hadn’t rehearsed any Prince songs into memory since “Scandalous” back in the Year of Batman; I’d left my atrocious song-lyric poetry aside. When Simone invited me to stay at her studio in the 13th arrondissement, I was a first-year law student in New York City and an aspiring music journalist trying to build on a Vibe magazine internship from the previous summer. I was also still aspiring to sleep with Simone four years after first peeping at her on the 6 train.

I prepped myself for Paris with some rental videotapes from Tower Video: oldies like April in Paris, Funny Face, and An American in Paris. I don’t remember anything about them now; none made an impact. Terence Trent D’Arby mentioned 18th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac in his album notes as a personal hero, so I left for France reading The Chouans — another work of art that entered in one ear and out the other. I touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in platform shoes and Gap bell-bottoms because (thanks Lenny Kravitz) how else could one arrive in Paris for the first time?

This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores.

Rubbernecking from the backseat of Simone’s Martiniquan girlfriend’s red Fiat, I soaked in all the beige buildings with their decorative architecture, the crowded cafés, twentysomethings like me dressed in black and dragging cigarettes. But saying overmuch about the sights and smells of the city rings false to me. The truth is, I’d flown more than 2,000 miles across the Atlantic to get laid. France wasn’t my first time abroad. Two years prior I visited my college girlfriend studying in Madrid and already experienced my first fish-out-of-water feelings with Spanish culture. Nine months back, I’d flown to London alone for a week as a graduation gift. Still, in many ways, I was 23 going on 19, with an immature, naïve sense of entitlement telling me international travel was some kind of given. France eventually turned out to be a liberating place for me years later, for reasons that would’ve been unfamiliar that first time around. But as an eight-day vacation, visiting a crush I hoped to seduce in the most romantic city in the world, my Parisian experience went only as deep as I could receive it at the time.

Imagine Hippopotamus as the Olive Garden of Paris, an appropriate enough place for hungry young adults on a budget. My palate at the time wasn’t too far advanced beyond Chef Boyardee anyway. Out on the town with Simone, night number one, I ordered a saumon fumé expecting something like the Southern salmon croquettes I grew up on. I can’t remember what fish I expected canard to be. I’d never eaten smoked salmon or duck before. Hundreds of francs wasted. I thought we’d hail the French equivalent of a Manhattan yellow taxi, but Parisian cabs only lay in wait on certain street corners, so we walked back to her apartment sightseeing and people-watching. At her studio she introduced me to the music of an Icelander named Björk. I’d waited all night for the dessert of Simone’s lips, and before falling asleep together, she served them up. They tasted like a French kiss on the steps of Versailles.

Simone made me laugh constantly; our time together always a sitcom. She was the most talented woman I’d ever dated at that point, and cute enough to get cast in a Kwamé video. What magnetized me the most was her artist’s life, her hustle, her self-actualization. She was my first artistic love, a reflection of what I started daring to see in myself. The next morning she had an appointment at a recording studio, singing on the demo of some French musicians. I stayed behind, folding open the wrought-iron shutters in her window frame to stare out onto the Asian Quarter. James Baldwin (I’d gone from never reading him at all to reading everything he’d ever written) once said, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.” Many black American men my age never expected to live past 25. Both my hubris and my upbringing told me otherwise. Hands folded behind me, I stood in the sunlight of Simone’s window wearing my crown.

In the future, I’d become a lot more intimately familiar with the city, but in retrospect, Simone took me around to almost everything worth seeing in a week. A Louvre exhibit explored how ancient Egypt influenced Western art. We paid respects at the graves of artists who really didn’t mean all that much to me (Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust) and those who did (Richard Wright, Jim Morrison), walking the winding paths of Père Lachaise cemetery. We shot each other on camera climbing the iron stairway of the Eiffel Tower. The Notre Dame was closed for restoration, but the gothic Sacré-Cœur church gave us a solemn candlelit moment at the highest point in Paris one rainy night. And I braved the Métro by myself for the first time in search of Nutella crêpes, the Moulin Rouge, and New Morning, the site of my favorite Prince bootleg tape. I peered through the nightclub window with the strains of his June 15, 1987 aftershow ringing through my ears.

* * *

Like those Magic Eye posters so popular at precisely that moment in the ’90s, I could always pick out the 3D Prince significance from any 2D locale if I stared long enough. Night number seven, we saw a wack noir movie, Romeo Is Bleeding, on the Champs-Élysées and passed the Nova-Park Élysées luxury hotel on our way to the theater. I knew from Prince biographies that he stayed there in June 1985, holed up in a penthouse suite playing with new synthesizers while his management tried cajoling him into enjoying his first real trip to Paris. I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20. (By contrast, I can’t remember Michael Jackson, that stranger in Moscow, ever mentioning Paris.) Made-up utopias like Paisley Park and Uptown were central to Prince’s work, places where freedom reigns and anything goes — most of all dance, music, sex, and romance. Western history has forever promoted the French capital as a land of liberation, tolerance, equality, sex, and romance. This might account for his Paris obsession in songs like “Sign o’ the Times,” “Condition of the Heart,” “Cindy C,” “Sexy M.F.,” and others. What’s so funny, so typically workaholic Prince is that once he actually got to vacation in Paris, young and rich and famous enough to enjoy anything the city had to offer, he chose to stay in his hotel room playing keyboards.

By mid-August he was back — explaining to his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin why she wouldn’t be costarring in Under the Cherry Moon and proposing marriage in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. The beautiful ones celebrated for days at places I couldn’t afford with law school loan reimbursement checks: dinners at Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, partying at Le Palace. Soon he was off to Côte d’Azur to film a movie. He was 27.

I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20.

There was no Prince on the night I gambled on going beyond kisses. We’d eaten earlier in the Marais district, at an LGBTQ-popular restaurant called Foufounes (French for Pussies). I’d almost given up on the would-be love affair. At home we split a bottle of wine and aired everything out. Off and on for over four years — through Broadway plays, Alvin Ailey dance shows, movies, dinners — I’d been chasing Simone whenever I was back from college. Even after I committed to someone else: the college sweetheart I’d already been with since the year we first met. Simone always put her dreams above settling down with anybody and I always refused to accept what she was saying.

“I just felt too much pressure to live up to your idea of who I am,” she confessed. Years passed before I saw the truth she kept trying to tell me in different ways. She also just wasn’t that into me, there was that too. Ego and my emotional learning curve made all of that hard to accept. But. On the night there was no Prince, there was Miles Davis and his 18-minute blues, “Star People.” I warmed a bottle of body oil on her electric stove and lay slick, massaging fingers all over her shoulders, back, arms, backside. Then she let me go further. Not completely further, but further. Saturday morning, we woke up spooning and laughed easily.

Years later in an erotica anthology entitled Wanderlust, I published a short story, “Irrésistible,” buffing up the ballad of Simone and Miles with a spritz of sentimental Krylon spray paint. I’d renamed her Solange way before Beyoncé became a thing, a name Simone loved, the name of her Martiniquan girlfriend’s mom. “Irrésistible,” like our affair, ended like this:

In my final moments in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, Solange and I stood at the gate holding hands silently. When my final call was announced, we both smiled. She kissed me twice on the cheeks before I boarded the plane. I turned back to look at her a final time—recalling Charlene’s tears when I left Spain months ago—but Solange had turned to walk away. I turned again and stepped onto the plane.

* * *

Color her peach and black: A pretty mademoiselle in a skintight dress shimmies in a crowd of nearly 20,000 screaming Parisians. The sister dances, excited as all hell, next to her flamboyant teenage cousin Luc. And Prince is onstage — spinning, doing splits, leaping off pianos through “Housequake,” “When Doves Cry,” and “The Cross.” “Hot Thing,” “Purple Rain,” and “1999.” Her very first concert is the Bercy stadium Sign o’ the Times Tour stop, and she’s having the time of her life. Some months down the line she’ll ask a friend to design a dress for her 18th birthday inspired by protégé Jill Jones in the “Mia Bocca” video. Her brown eyes, heavy-lidded like some French-Caribbean femme fatale, hardly blink during the hour and a half drummer Sheila E. bangs her skins and dancer Cat Glover jacks her body across stage and our hero takes guitar solo after guitar solo.

I wish I’d known Christine then; we’d never see Prince together live in concert. Two thousand miles away in the Bronx that day, I might’ve been registering for summer school to make up a math class. In the Year of Sign o’ the Times, I had no idea the woman I’d marry one day was shaking her fanny and screaming for my idol over in Europe while I was fighting my way out of high school with both fists.

“Yesterday I tried to write a novel,” Prince once sang (in 1982, on “Moonbeam Levels”), “but I didn’t know where to begin / So I laid down in the grass tryin’ to feel the world turn.” My stab in the same direction came in 1995, trying to write a novel of my own, at 24, while living in south London studying abroad. Don Draper’s French mom-in-law on Mad Men once dropped a quip about her daughter I’ve never forgotten: “This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament, but you’re not an artist.” I spent most of those months in my Tooting Bec flat proving to myself that my talent outweighed my artistic temperament; my novel was the result. Naturally I can’t bear to read it now, but I finished it, and the completion pulled me out the other side of something.

Law school, in retrospect, and even at the time, was a plan B. I skipped the bar exam by the end, graduating instead into the wave of cultural critics documenting the continuing movement of hip-hop into popular mainstream culture. Eventually there were books I was prouder of: a memoir told in essays about my upbringing in the Bronx; an examination of funk pioneer Sly Stone’s 1960s-hangover album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. After Simone, I dated a few writers and editors, a wine sommelier, a yoga teacher. When “Irrésistible” got published, I left Simone a copy with the doorman of her Chelsea apartment building; I hadn’t seen her in two years. And by then I’d moved to France.

How else did I grow up after those first days in Paris? Like many of my favorite stories, this isn’t really about me, it’s about Prince. I’ll say this though. The year Prince divorced his second and final wife, Manuela Testolini, the Year of 3121 had I still been keeping track of such things, I married Christine — the mother of our Paris-born 1-year-old son — at the city hall of suburban Arcueil, France, in the spring of 2006. Christine: the Martiniquan girlfriend of Simone who’d picked me up in her red Fiat the fateful day of my first visit to her country. Our origin story as a couple belongs to another essay, from a less impressionable, far less wide-eyed time in my life. And our wedding song was Bebel Gilberto’s dreamy bossa nova, “Samba da Bênção” — not “Alexa de Paris.”

* * *

Miles Marshall Lewis is the Harlem-based author of Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar (St. Martin’s Press), due next year. His essays, criticism and celebrity profiles have appeared in GQ, The New York Times, NPR and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

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Re: Hate Mail

Illustration by the author

Amy Kurzweil | Longreads | November 2018 | 9 minutes (2,322 words)

 

I’ve received 15 emails from my internet stalker in the past four days. It’s like watching an inmate from behind a two-way mirror. He read a short story I wrote once satirically titled “The Greatest Story Ever Written.” It’s about a group of male writers who lose their way. He didn’t like it. I think I’m open to criticism, but I wonder whether I really am. This correspondence has progressed for months: he condemns and insults, then catches himself being too harsh, too forward. Sometimes he apologizes. He thanks me for listening. He sends emails to courteously correct typos in his previous emails, and even these offer a Nietzsche quote as an epigraph. “We spared neither ourselves nor others…” He invites me to read his latest blogpost. If it won’t break your legs, he says, just tell me if you like it. I think about what it really means to like something. I compose responses to him in my head; clever, angry things about the patriarchy. But I don’t send them.

***

The first internet comment I ever read about myself was on YouTube, listed under an interview I’d done with my father. I was 25. Ray Kurzweil’s daughter has nice legs but her boobs aren’t that big. When I read it I thought: I feel like my boobs are pretty big. And also: I knew that dress my mother bought me was too short. And also: I felt ashamed. I was sorry I’d brought a body into a communion of ideas. I should have worn tights. The event was called “Women at the Frontier.” It honored women making great strides in technology. A snowboarder who lost her limbs spoke about prosthetics. Daughters of innovative men in technology interviewed their fathers.

I asked my dad, the inventor and genius, “What do you think you’ve learned from me?”

“You’ve helped me become a better writer,” my father answered.

 

After my first book came out, when I was 30, I received an email from a boy. In my head he was newly bar mitzvahed, 13 years old, wearing a kippah and a black suit — that’s the scene his gmail photo conjured. But he wrote like a real man, an ironic one. Should I be your husband? was the subject line. I sent back what I felt was a cunning response: The wedding has been scheduled for 12 December. Your mother should wear lilac. Your sister is not invited. I was very proud of my wit. I hope seven children suits you, and if they aren’t all girls I will cast the offending parties into the river in baskets. Do not try to retrieve them.

 

I’m not one to cold-message women on facebook, another man cold-messaged me on Facebook. He said I’d come up in conversation on a date with a woman he met on Jswipe. He said he read my book, thinks I’m attractive, has a hunch we would get along. I composed a message in my head: I am pleased to receive the news of my fame. It’s been a dream/fetish of mine to know my name is on the lips of young Jews on internet dates all across this country. Be fruitful and multiply with this woman and may all your children’s names begin with A. But something told me he wasn’t one for irony. The man’s technically unacknowledged message still lives in that wasteland of Requests, with the whatups and hiiiis and like my pages, and the Uber driver from Florida who found me somehow — I was in Naples for the Jewish Book festival and I must have been fishing for readers. Definitely interested in the convo we were having. Let’s talk over dinner next time you’re in town.

 

My internet stalker, however, isn’t seeking marriage or dinner. He isn’t interested in my body; He wants to volley with my mind. Amy, We need to fight, or else I shall keep thinking of things to say to you. My internet stalker uses the word “shall.” He’s refined. He’s quoted Lord Chesterfield from 1774 and Matthew Arnold from 1849. These are not writers I’ve read, but Arnold’s The Strayed Reveller sounds like the man I avoid at parties. My boyfriend says: ignore him. He sees me in my defensive stance, resisting the palpable urge to hold up my hands, like the gesture I make passing a neighbor’s barking dog: I’m not on your property and I have nothing to hide.

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The Boy Who Wasn’t My Boyfriend

Illustration by Melanie Lambrick

Allie Zenwirth | Longreads | October 2018 | 13 minutes (3,360 words)

1.

During the short break between prayers on Rosh Hashanah, a month after Shia transferred to my school, his father passed me on his way out to the bathroom. I was leaning my butt on a folded chair. He said: “You and Shia are study partners, right?”

I said yes.

He said something positive. It might have been “Shia likes it,” or simply that we were doing a good job. I went red in the face and looked away. He left.

For a few weeks after that I kept thinking “What an honor it must be that his father spoke to me.” Now it makes me cringe. It wasn’t a natural thought. It felt like someone had told me this was the proper response. So, I made myself think that.

2.

Whenever I think of him my heart feels like it’s slowly being heaved up and down.
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The State of the Bookstore Union

Illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | October 2018 | 13 minutes (3,497 words)

The Strand is the largest and most divisive of New York City’s independent bookstores. For its customers, it’s a literary landmark, a convenient public bathroom in Union Square, and one of the last places in Manhattan where tourists can see real New York Bohemia up close — like Colonial Williamsburg, but with poor people (booksellers) instead of settlers. For its employees, the store has more often been an object of resentment. Patti Smith worked there briefly in the early 1970s, but told New York magazine she quit because it “wasn’t very friendly.” Mary Gaitskill worked there for a year and a half and described it, in a thinly veiled story from Bad Behavior, as, “a filthy, broken-down store” staffed by “unhappy homosexuals.” In 2005, an anonymous employee ran a (pretty dumb) blog called “I Hate the Strand” and the reviews on the store’s Glassdoor page are still largely negative. “Employees who were so miserable they joked about torching the building,” wrote one former employee. “Honestly, shut up with the tote bags,” wrote another. (About twenty percent of the Strand’s revenue comes from merch. They sell a lot of tote bags.)

I worked at the Strand for a little over two years and honestly I liked it! I’d worked as a bartender previously, but by the time I was hired as a bookseller five of the seven bars at which I’d been employed had shuttered, either because of rising rents, the death of the owner, or, in one case, because too many of the regulars died or moved away. The Strand offered stability and a less traumatic day-to-day experience. I liked my co-workers, I attended fewer funerals, and I didn’t have to stay up until 4 a.m. every night when I had class in the morning; although because I was hired at $10 an hour, I still had to bartend on my days off to make ends meet. The store unionized in 1976 with the UAW, and it’s one of the only places in New York where bookselling — a notoriously ill-compensated industry; the drunken, wistful uncle of Publishing — can be a sustainable, long-term career for people who are not independently wealthy. The unionization has also given the store a measure of leftist cred that management has been quick to monetize: #Resistance merchandise lines the walls — ”Nevertheless She Persisted” tote bags, Ruth Bader Ginsburg magnets, and a t-shirt that reads “I Love Naps But I Stay Woke.” Read more…

Marriage Proposal Follies

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Amy Deneson | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,022 words)

 

This will be the day

That you will hear me say

That I will never run away

– Prince, Diamonds and Pearls

 

On the day New York State legalized same-sex marriage, I proposed to my girlfriend in the New York Times Modern Love column. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The column’s editor, Daniel Jones, had emailed me to request an essay he’d previously rejected for being too political. He explained the paper was dedicating part of every section in the Sunday edition to Marriage Equality. “If it’s not already committed elsewhere, there isn’t much time.”

I accepted his retraction and, being a personal-is-political kind of lesbian, sent back a few additions to his notes and ended the revision with a marriage proposal.

“Are you sure?” Jones called. “This will be the column’s first.”

“I’m ready, if you are, Dan.”

He recommended I find a way share the piece with her before Thursday, when the digital edition went live. “You want her to be the first to know.”
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The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Kathryn Smith | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,450 words)

 
I spent New Year’s in a hot pink temple shaped like a lotus flower, surrounded by 100 other people with their eyes closed and their legs crossed like pretzels. I had taken a vow of silence and not spoken to another human in three days. It was so quiet that I could hear the twinkly lights on the ceiling humming.

I’m a mid-30s white woman with a cat, a small apartment, and a mid-level office job. I don’t meditate, really. I vociferously hate chanting. I don’t know what I think about swamis in long orange robes who believe energy runs through everything and rocks have feelings — I have a 401K and a thoroughly sensible life.

But I went to an ashram because I thought it might fix something, and I think it kind of did.
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